My Five Favorite Things About My House

I'm 78.6% sure that I read a blog somewhere that had a "5 favorite things about my house" post, back before I was a blogger, and just a lowly blog stalker. I did a search for it, and couldn't find it. I did find blogs about "My Favorite Movies" and "My Favorite Posts Of The Year." But 5 things about my house? Nope. So I either imagined it, or it disappeared somewhere in the depths of Blogland.


I wouldn't have been able to do this post a year ago, when we lived in our apartment. I hated that place with a PASSION. We lived on the third floor, and each step had a metal trim piece on the edge, making it SUPER slick if it would rain. So I was always terrified that me or one of the girls would slip on the stairs and tumble to our death. And you had to love our neighbors would had a daughter who would come up on our back porch and steal borrow my daughter's toys/chalk/bubbles. But you had to give that mom credit for being able to act surprised and say "Oh, I didn't know where she got those at?" every time I would go bang  knock politely on her door and tell her that her daughter took my daughters toys AGAIN. But living there just makes me appreciate my house so much more.

One of my FAVORITE things about my house is my bedroom closet. I couldn't get the whole closet in the picture, but it measures 7 feet wide and 16.5 feet long. We always joke that it's like it's own bedroom. My side is on the left, and thank goodness my husband doesn't complain that I also took over half of his side too. And that I took over his DVD rack and made it into my shoe rack. Thanks Baby.

Another thing I love about our house are the granite countertops. It's called santa cecelia, and apparently it's very popular. I just did a google search and there are a ton of pictures of it. This was one of the upgrades we did on the house, since the standard choices were all blah. I love granite because of the dark and light spots, the veins, the random patterns. The standard choices were just the same pattern, repeated over and over.

a close up

This pic is from December, while we were still in the building process.

So, I don't have a good picture that shows how high the ceilings are, but these pics from when we were still building show the height pretty well. The ceilings in the living room and our bedroom are 12 feet high, and the entryway ceiling is 16 feet high. We do have that weird angle thing that you can see in the first pic above Jake's head, and it's in the living room, our bedroom, and all three kids rooms. So you can't just paint the walls, because then, you're stuck with do you paint that angle thing, or not? Then, if you're going paint that, you might as well paint the ceiling too. And with the ceiling height, even with our huge ladder, it does take a lot of convincing to get my hubby to agree to painting.

Living room

Entryway (babe's office is to the right, I <3 his doorway arch)

Our bathroom was the second room we painted after we moved in (the living room was the first). I always envisioned a cool, relaxing bathroom. We use Ralph Lauren's "Beach Water" on the walls, and use RL Candlelight on the top. We bought those at (I think) Home Depot, and they were discontinuing/not carrying the RL line anymore, so everything RL was half off. So the Candlelight paint that was normally $50 a gallon was half off. Yay!  The candlelight topcoat looks a lot like watered down school glue, and you do have to get the candlelight special roller (okay, maybe you don't have to, but we did. For half off). The roller was just like a very bumpy roller. You want to make sure you do a very random pattern, or you'll be able to see streaks as it dries (we have a couple of streaks, but what can you do). It's hard to take a picture of, I had to take 14 pictures just to get these two halfway decent ones.

Yup, we have that weird angle thing in the bathroom too.

I'm not a bath person, but I love the garden tub. My mom made the valences, the fabric matches the master bedroom drapes.

The last thing I love about our house is the fireplace. We upgraded from brick to stone, and we had them extend it from about 5 feet tall to ceiling height (which just accentuated the height of the ceiling). You can see it when you walk in the front door, so it's definitely a focal point. And you'll see it in the background of most of our posed pics. I did a grouping of "D"s on the mantle (for our last name). The picture on the right was a wedding gift from hubby's work. The fireplace insert was a housewarming gift from my good friend M. I would love to put a huge starburst mirror above the mantle, but hubsters doesn't want to cover up the stone, so I let it go. For now.

So those are the top 5 things I love about my house. What about your house would be in your top 5?